Volume 3

The value returned by Enterprise Architecture (EA) is increasingly under consideration by researchers and practitioners. They struggle to justify the EA investments that currently are made. Quantifying the EA benefits has always been a challenge because measurements and real value delivered can not often be expressed in simple technical oriented metrics only. In this article we suggest a multi-perspective framework, based on the concept of Balanced Scorecard, for providing guidance about where to identify and quantify the value of EA from the perspective management. A derived methodology is used to localize a few selected Key Performance Indicators for measuring the benefits of EA that help practitioners to design and implement the suggested framework.

Many companies expect their IT developers to understand their business strategy and to specify IT systems that will impact favorably the execution of their business strategy. Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) address these issues. In this paper, we present a course that introduces EA and SOA to undergraduate CS students. The course is based on an immersive problem-based pedagogy coupled with role playing. The goal is to have the students conceptualize the theory out of the practical experience they gain in he course. Their experience is developed through a game in which the student teams manage competing companies, specify and then develop an IT system (using workflow and web-services). The course places an emphasis on the enterprise-wide impact of the IT systems. Through their practice, the students discover some of the important good-practices used in the industry. They also learn a systematic approach to address enterprise-wide problems.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) in the context of enterprise engineering addresses aspects of developing, improving and integrating organizations. The article introduces an approach to EA proposing Integration Concepts (IC) to reconcile changing business process requirements and information systems. Being process-driven and supporting integration issues the chosen IC is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Therefore the contribution aims at developing a methodology to support service engineering by defining architectural domains in an EA. The paper shows the need for methods in the field of domain engineering supporting the design of a SOA. The main contribution of the article is an algorithm based modeling approach and a methodology to support service domain clustering. The clustering algorithms are using a model considering business processes, information systems and information system interfaces. The algorithm adopts network-centric approaches used in the field of social network analysis to define and/or identify service domain clusters in complex scenarios. The article summarizes a case study in a globally operating company and closes with a conclusion. The article is organized by chapters addressing context, objective, approach, case, results and lessons learned.

A fast and continuously changing business environment demands flexible software systems easy to modify and maintain. Due to the extent of interconnection between systems and the internal quality of each system many IT decision-makers find it difficult predicting the effort of making changes to their systems. To aid IT-decision makers in making better decisions regarding what modifications to make to their systems, this article proposes extended influence diagrams and enterprise architecture models for maintainability analysis. A framework for assessing maintainability using enterprise architecture models is presented and the approach is illustrated by a fictional example decision situation.